Tuesday, September 22, 2009

one down

When I found out I was pregnant, I didn't know what to expect, but always thought it was going to be tough to adjust to an ever-changing body. After an entire summer of house hunting in this ridiculously tight market and looking for a minivan, turns out the pregnancy is the easy part.

I have lost far too many hours of sleep, nearly pulled my hair out on multiple occasions, and shed buckets of tears over the houses we didn't get, the ones on which our offer was accepted and spent hundreds of dollars on inspections only to cancel over some weird buyer contingency at the 11th hour, making arrangements to test drive a van and finding out it was sold right before leaving to get there, etc.

Today is no exception to this experience. We're in escrow for the third time. This house is a fixer and is being sold as is. Unfortunately, the inspector we used totally screwed us and placed us in a very vulnerable position. He didn't check the plumbing...didn't check for leaks 'cause "faucets tend to leak in older homes." huh? So, here we are scrambling to find out more about the house...and, of course, shelling out more $$ for more inspections to determine if it's worth our $$ to continue with the sale. Thankfully, we'll have our go/no-go decision by Thursday. Our inspection contingency ends on Friday...talk about cutting it close! So, we'll table this drama until then.

This past weekend, the universe was on our side (finally)! Since the market for used Siennas is just as competitive as housing, we decided to broaden our search to include Odysseys as well. We met the seller at our mechanic's and took the Odyssey for a drive. Instantly, it was clearly much more comfortable to drive. Fortunately, it was also in pristine condition -- both physically and mechanically. The sellers were a dream to work with too. Our mechanic came out of his garage and told us this was "a good one" which would provide us "many years without big problems". whew.

We sealed the deal later that afternoon. When we got home, we sat in the van in our carport and watched the demo DVD using the wireless headphones without feeling an ounce embarassed. This van has more features than we really need, but I'm sure we'll grow into it very quickly...and I'll be able to reclaim the hours I've been spending scouring car ads.